When developing therapy plans for kids who use AAC, it’s common to look at kids with typically developing language to decide what to work on next. But should we? Do kids who use SGDs to communicate develop early verbs and inflectional morphemes similarly to typically-developing children?

In this study, conversations between four 8–9-year-old children who used AAC and an adult were analyzed across a 10-month period. The conversations with adults were examined to see which verbs the kids used (ACTION verbs—John is playing versus STATE verbs—John is being silly), in which order, and whether they added inflection. Since the participants were just first learning to use verbs, their patterns were compared to children in a similar developmental period (1;6-3;0).

Compared to kids without disabilities, the participants:

used more action verbs than state verbs

used go, want, and like frequently

produced third-person singular -sless often and later than -ing and -ed

While the participants seemed to mirror typical kids, they did differ in one way—by NOT producing action verbs before state verbs, but rather producing both at the same time.

How does this help us? It gives us some idea of which verbs to target and in what order. For school-age kids with no cognitive impairment, we should target both action verbs and state verbs. As the authors point out, these kids are likely to already have the mental representations of these categories. So why aren’t they producing them? That likely falls on us (verbs aren’t on their systems, low expectations, lack of appropriate instructions, etc.). For young kids, we should follow typical development and focus on action verbs before state verbs. With action verbs, we can then follow typical verbal inflection development by targeting -ing (swimming) and -ed (opened), followed by state verbs and third person singular -s (knows).

Although this study only included four participants, it can boost our confidence in following typical language patterns for children who use AAC, and it offers some guidance in an area that many SLPs find challenging—making the jump to verb usage and morphology.